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Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Thursday signed the Virginia Literacy Act, a piece of legislation that will change Virginia’s literacy curriculum and require reading intervention services to young students who are struggling to read.
“This is a special day,” Youngkin said at an event Thursday morning at the Library of Virginia. “It's a day where we commemorate one of the most important pieces of legislation, I believe, that has been originated, passed and signed in the commonwealth of Virginia in a very, very long time.”
HB 319 and its companion bill SB 616 unanimously passed their respective chambers, and 60 members of the House and Senate signed on as co-patrons.
Delegate Carrie Coyner (R-Chesterfield), patron of the House bill, said the legislation will give students in Virginia the best chance they've ever had to read on grade level by third grade.
“As a commonwealth, we want to be the best at things and we oftentimes claim we are the best things,” Coyner said. “But sometimes we have to have honest conversations with ourselves, and be able to say, you know what, the path we're on isn't best serving our students and our teachers and our families.”
Children who read on grade level by the end of third grade are more likely to graduate high school and have higher lifelong incomes than those who don’t.
A study from the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening, or PALS, found that about 35% of K-2 students in the commonwealth scored below their expected levels last fall — a 20-year low that the researchers called “alarming.”
“Over the last few years, Virginia has seen a decrease in reading proficiency, full stop,” Youngkin said. “For far too long, we've condemned generations of children to a diminished future because we failed to teach them to read.”
PALS data from last spring showed that significantly more students ended the school year at high risk for reading difficulties as compared to spring 2019 data. The scores also show that the literacy skills of Black, Hispanic, English learners and low-income students are disproportionately identified as at high-risk for reading difficulties.
“This law that we're here celebrating today — it's historic,” Youngkin said. “It takes a comprehensive approach to literacy for students in the critical early grades.”
While there will be several changes affecting Henrico County Public Schools as a result of the legislation, the division already has a few of the requirements in place.
One component of the legislation, which goes into effect in the 2024-2025 school year, requires local school boards to provide reading intervention services to students in kindergarten through third grade who demonstrate substantial deficiencies based on certain assessments. HCPS already does this.
HCPS also already meets the requirement of assessing each student who receives such reading intervention services.
“We're really equipped to meet the demands of the bill,” Henrico School Board Chair Marcie Shea told the Citizen. “Fortunately in Henrico, for the past couple of years, we've had a focus on literacy ever since [Superintendent Amy Cashwell] came. . . We already have the science of reading embedded in our literacy plan that we've been using in Henrico, so we're kind of ahead of the curve on this bill.”
The changes coming to Henrico as a result of this legislation include the requirement to employ one reading specialist for every 550 students in kindergarten through third grade. Each reading specialist must have training in science-based reading research and evidence-based literacy instruction practices.
Right now, HCPS has 47 reading specialists in total, with at least 1 specialist in 34 schools. There are 12 Henrico schools that share six reading specialists.
The legislation also requires a literacy plan for kindergarten through third grade. HCPS has its own literacy plan now, but the language in the legislation seems to indicate that the division will need to use a program from the Virginia Department of Education curriculum lists or follow the procedures to have HCPS curriculum approved as an alternate program. HCPS doesn’t currently follow a “program,” but its components are based in the science of reading, according to school division officials.
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Anna Bryson is the Henrico Citizen’s education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar. Sign up here for her free weekly education newsletter.
